– the oldest marketing quote in the book

“away from a system of sick care in which we treat patients after they fall ill, to one of health care which supports well-being, prevention, and early intervention… Clinical innovations, patient preferences, and government program payment policies are prompting hospitals to shift certain services to alternative points of care and even to virtual environments that benefit from a cost and access perspective.”

The Stanford Social Innovation Review reports: “Platforms that provide a way for patients, caregivers, and staff to share stories and develop solutions across the health system are disrupting traditional hierarchies in medicine.’’

That sums up what is currently called Integrative, Functional, Precision, Regenerative, Holistic, or Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) healthcare – which is practiced by the majority of WebToMed clients.

“People shop and learn in a whole new way compared to just a few years ago, so marketers need to adapt or risk extinction.” –Brian Halligan, founder & CEO of HubSpot

Roughly three out of four Americans currently take some kind of supplement that’s outside the medical mainstream. A 2018 survey found more than 90% of American adults living with chronic pain seek natural, non-opioid treatments.

Doctors Health Press reports that 70% of adults over 50 (Baby Boomers) use some form of CAM medicine. However, according to AARP, 69% of those surveyed said they had not discussed their CAM use with their primary physician.

According to an American Psychological Association study and a Zoc Doc survey, 93% of Millenials do not schedule preventative healthcare visits with primary care physicians. They do their own research online, mostly visiting health blogs and chat rooms for CAM solutions. They trust friends, family, social media, blogger and podcast influencers – not traditional medical institutions and authority figures – for general, non-emergency care.

Gen Xers tend not to be brand loyalists, according to Ragan’s Health Care Communication News. Surveys consistently show that they have short term relationship expectations when it comes to health care. They expect to change health care providers to best suit their needs. Generation X is the first generation to go from health care patients to health care consumers.

According to the Pew Research Center there were 71 million Millennials (20-35 year olds) and 74 million Boomers (52-70 year olds) in the U.S. in 2016. During 2019 Millennials are expected to overtake Boomers as their numbers swell to 73 million and Boomers decline to 72 million. That’s a potential market of 145 million Americans who are likely to prefer internet research and CAM treatments to primary physicians and pharmaceuticals for general care.

Healthcare providers (HCPs) are scrambling to fill demand. Today, the majority of American OBGYNs offer at least one alternative medicine modality, and primary physicians are beginning to integrate acupuncture, PRP, and BHRT into their standard medical practice. Even the traditional medicine stalwart, Mayo Clinic, has published a CAM handbook. More and more physicians like Dr. Anthony Youn, are incorporating it into their practice, or, like Dr. Sara Gottfried, switching over to it full time and becoming best-selling authors.

How do these statistics play out in real (Google) life?

The buyer’s journey: looking for short cuts

Health IT Analytics recently published a Yext Patient Search Behavior report. When asked what resources they used when selecting a healthcare provider, only 17% said provider profiles, while 54% searched healthcare articles. What does this mean for HCPs? They need content.

“Fewer patients are going directly to physician profile pages for information, but the content on your website still plays a crucial role in helping your information surface in search. Make sure your content is appropriately tagged with Schema markup…which describes website content in a way that search engines can understand — so your content will be more likely to show up for a relevant search.”

The vast variety of available CAM treatments seems to be splintering broad, traditional medical searches into smaller, more specialized ones. People are seeking in-depth explanations about how their body functions, and how specific treatments function on it. Or, they’re seeking recommendations from a trusted friend who’s already done so.

Example:

Let’s look at diabetes, one of the fastest growing diseases in America. According to the Centers for Disease Control over 100 million American adults have diabetes or pre-diabetes. What are they searching for?

The majority of WtM clients (past, present and currently being pitched) work in Dr. Hyman’s CAM space, servicing patients who seek preventative/minimally invasive/non-pharma care. Even the Xtelligent Healthcare Media is publishing white papers about the cost benefits of pharmaceutical-free diabetes reversal.

Like investment consultants who diversify a portfolio for lower risk / higher yield, targeting multiple popular “micro-searches” – in our client profiles and in our patient education library – appears to be the most strategic approach.

The current era of logo design began in the 1870s with the first abstract logo, the Bass red triangle. As of 2014 many corporations, products, brands, services, agencies and other entities use an ideogram (sign, icon) or an emblem (symbol) or a combination of sign and emblem as a logo.

As a result, only a few of the thousands of ideograms in circulation are recognizable without a name. An effective logo may consist of both an ideogram and the company name (logotype) to emphasize the name over the graphic, and employ a unique design via the use of letters, colors, and additional graphic elements.

Ideograms and symbols may be more effective than written names (logotypes), especially for logos translated into many alphabets in increasingly globalized markets.

Authentic brands don’t emerge from marketing cubicles or advertising agencies. They emanate from everything the company does.

Howard Schultz

Designing a good logo may require involvement from the marketing team and the design agency (if the process is outsourced), or graphic design contest platform (if it is crowdsourced). It requires a clear idea about the concept and values of the brand as well as understanding of the consumer or target group.

Principles of craft

Legibility is primarily the concern of the typeface designer, to ensure that each individual character or glyph is unambiguous and distinguishable from all other characters in the typeface. In part, legibility also is an aspect of concern for the typographer to assure selection of a typeface with appropriate clarity of design for the intended use at the intended size.

Selection of case, upper, called also capitals, or lower, severely influences the legibility of typography because using all-caps or upper case letters, significantly reduces legibility.

Legibility refers to perception and readability refers to comprehension understanding the meaning. Good typographers and graphic designers aim to achieve excellence in both. Some commonly findings of legibility research include:

Text set in lower case is more legible than text set all in upper case: capitals or all-caps.

As human societies emerged, the develop of writing was driven by pragmatic exigencies such as exchanging information, maintain codifying laws and record history.

In most languages, writing is a complement to speech or spoken language. Writing is not a language but a form of technology.Within a language system, writing relies on many of the same structures as speech, such as vocabulary, grammar and semantics, with the added dependency of a system of signs or symbols, usually in the form of a formal alphabet. The result of writing is called text, and the recipient of text is called a reader.

Alphabets

In a perfectly phonological alphabet, the phonemes and letters would correspond perfectly in two directions: a writer could predict the spelling of a word given its pronunciation.

Alphabets are usually associated with a standard ordering of their letters. This makes them useful for purposes of collation, specifically by allowing words to be sorted in alphabetical order.

It also means that their letters can be used as an alternative method of “numbering” ordered items, in such contexts as numbered lists. The English word alphabet came into Middle English from the Late Latin word alphabetum.

The term “alphabet” is used by linguists and paleographers in both a wide and a narrow sense.

Etymology

The English word alphabet came into Middle English from the Late Latin word alphabetum, which in turn originated in the Greek (alphabētos), from alpha and beta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet.

Alpha and beta in turn came from the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet, and originally meant ox and house respectively.

Informally the term “ABCs” is sometimes used for the alphabet as in the alphabet song, and knowing one’s ABCs for literacy, or as a metaphor for knowing the basics about anything.

In a perfectly phonological alphabet, the phonemes and letters would correspond perfectly in two directions: a writer could predict the spelling of a word given its pronunciation.
Alphabets are usually associated with a standard ordering of their letters. This makes them useful for purposes of collation, specifically by allowing words to be sorted in alphabetical order.

It also means that their letters can be used as an alternative method of “numbering” ordered items, in such contexts as numbered lists. The English word alphabet came into Middle English from the Late Latin word alphabetum.

Typography is the use of type to advocate, communicate, celebrate, educate, elaborate, illuminate, and disseminate. Along the way, the words and pages become art.

James Felici

Another terminology is that of deep and shallow orthographies, where the depth of an orthography is the degree to which it diverges from being truly phonemic

In an ideal phonemic orthography, there would be a complete one-to-one correspondence between the graphemes (letters) and the phonemes of the language, and each phoneme would invariably be represented by its corresponding grapheme.

This would mean that the spelling of a word would unambiguously and transparently indicate its pronunciation; and conversely that a speaker knowing the pronunciation of a word would be able to infer its spelling without any doubt.

This ideal situation is rarely if ever achieved in practice – it seems that nearly all alphabetic orthographies deviate from it to some degree or other.